Silicon Valley campaign bundler Wade Randlett and his wife, Lorna, have rounded up more than $700,000 for Obama.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Silicon Valley campaign bundler Wade Randlett and his wife, Lorna,...

Image 3 of 4

Campaign buttons pinpoint some of the top issues in the presidential race.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Campaign buttons pinpoint some of the top issues in the...

Image 4 of 4

A local brewery is having fun with the President on their beer label. Wade Randlett and his wife Lorna have helped raise $700,000 for the President Obama's election campaign in 12 events in the Bay Area.

The stars of technology in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley - the capital of innovation - are now outpacing Hollywood celebrities and Wall Street moguls in fundraising for President Obama's re-election campaign.

In the 2012 election - the most expensive presidential race in history - donors from the area have contributed a stunning $14,703,167 to Obama's campaign, according to a new analysis of campaign cash conducted for The Chronicle by MapLight.org, a nonpartisan organization that analyzes money and politics.

That compares with $14.5 million from New York City donors and $6.3 million from HollywoodDemocrats, the study showed.

The heavy donations raised during Obama's 12 Bay Area fundraising trips "represent this shift of financial power, which is now translating into political influence, from the East Coast to the West Coast and Silicon Valley," says Melinda Jackson, a San Jose State associate political science professor who also heads the university's Survey and Policy Research Institute.

"It shows the increasing power of the tech industry - and the increasing power of the individuals who have gotten wealthy in that industry," says Daniel Newman, MapLight's co-founder and president. "They are people who give for ideological interests - and business interests."

Power shift

The new findings underscore the emergence of a new powerhouse group of regional donors who have poured millions of dollars into Democratic presidential politics while solidifying their political influence.

Unlike the sometimes-negative associations that can tag along with the Hollywood glitterati and the hedge-fund kings of Wall Street, Democratic insiders say there's been little downside for Obama in rubbing elbows with wealthy "digerati" of Silicon Valley.

"The Democrats are targeting more young people and higher-educated people - and those folks are influenced by the fact that the president is meeting with the Google guys," says Jackson. "It speaks to the power and the importance of the valley."

Even Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a key Obama surrogate, tips his hat to the rising power of the Bay Area, which has increasingly competed with Hollywood for political attention.

"Silicon Valley is becoming the most significant contributor and issue shaper in the nation," he said. The president has made 17 trips to California, including the 12 to the Bay Area, over the past three years, and raised more than twice the money in Northern California as he did in the movie capital.

Unusual convergence

Wade Randlett, a co-founder of the Silicon Valley advocacy group the Technology Network - who, along with his wife, Lorna, ranked among the president's top "bundlers" of campaign donations - said the valley's new ranking as the No. 1 source of Democratic campaign cash is the result of an unusual convergence of "trade, entrepreneurs and innovation working together" on shared political goals.

"Venture capitalists invest in the future," said Lorna Randlett, who helped her husband raise upward of $700,000 for the Obama campaign, according to OpenSecrets.com, which tracks money in politics. "And innovation now means something different: It used to be about being smart and snappy ... but now it's about what we need as a country to survive in a global marketplace."

Among the other tech-related insiders who amassed major donations for Obama: Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of San Francisco's Salesforce.com and an Obama finance chairman, who raised more than $600,000 in donations; and former eBay executive and California Controller Steve Westly, who raised $438,000 for Obama.

"It never would have happened 20 years ago. But Silicon Valley is becoming a force, tech is doing well - and people here care about the future," said Westly, who heads the Westly Group, a valley venture capital firm.

"We are finally attuned to the notion that we have to retrain our workforce for the jobs of the 21st century," Westly said, adding that that task requires a focus on many of the issues the valley cares about - immigration reform, education, trade, and research and development.

Dinner without fundraising

Westly was at the table with Obama last year at a dinner at the Woodside home of star venture capitalist John Doerr. It was a rare Silicon Valley Obama appearance that wasn't a fundraiser, and demonstrated the valley's clout.

At public events, too, Obama also acknowledged the rising prominence of the region's tech leaders, holding a town hall event at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters led by Zuckerberg and another at LinkedIn in Mountain View, and a virtual session with San Francisco's Twitter from Washington.

Wade Randlett - chairman and founder of Enagra Holdings, a San Francisco firm that owns NextFuels, a producer of renewable energy fuels - said the financial firepower of Silicon Valley interests dates back to 1999, when presidential candidate Al Gore was the first to pay serious attention to tech's innovators and their campaign cash.

Valley interests "spent a lot of time cultivating relationships" with the Democratic party and Washington, Randlett said.

Broad, maturing coalition

The result, he said: More than a decade later, the region's youthful businesspeople - some of whom began their powerhouse firms in a college dorm or a garage - have morphed into a "broad and maturing" coalition that incorporates business interests from venture capital to social media to green technologies.

And the Obama 2012 campaign maximized its outreach to Bay Area tech with a range of fundraising events. They included a series of intimate, $40,000-a-head roundtable discussions with tech donors and $25,000-a-head dinners for a few dozen at the homes of Yahoo President and CEO Marissa Mayer, when she was a Google executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO.

Student techies flocked to the lower-cost, $100-per-person rallies that attracted thousands to big venues like the Fox Theatre in Redwood City.

Shift in American culture

Elizabeth Pang-Fullerton of Greenbrae, a former marketing manager of Symantec - and a Democrat who donated more than $40,000 to Democratic causes to help Obama this cycle - said the success of the president's fundraising in the region illustrates a shift in American culture as much as political influence.

"We know what New York is all about, and what Los Angeles is all about - but people forget how muchthe key is Silicon Valley," she said this week. "We represent the 21st century and moving forward ... and Barack's campaign is about moving."